A Victorian quest to find the source of the Nile

It was a hot day in September 1854 when John Hanning Speke, a tall, fair-haired young former officer in the East India Company army, stepped ashore from a P&O steamship at Aden. He intended to cross from this British-held port on the southern coast of what’s now Yemen to Somaliland in order to hunt wild game. The colonial governor refused to grant him permission for such a dangerous excursion; however, he was willing to allow Speke to join the expedition being launched by another, older former East India Company army officer: Richard F Burton.

That foray into Somaliland ended prematurely when the men were ambushed and stabbed by spear-wielding Somalis. But though Speke had disliked Burton’s arrogance even before this attack (which might have been avoided), his superior’s obsession with finding the source of the Nile made the younger man determined to get himself invited on any such expedition.

In the 1850s, the whereabouts of the Nile’s source was geography’s most elusive secret. The Greeks and Romans had failed to discover it, as had the Ottomans. By the mid-19th century, a succession of Greek, Italian and Maltese traders and adventurers had reached the position of the present town of Juba, some 2,000 miles south of the Nile delta, but attempts